ELK is a day-care institute emphasizing on high-end child education, located in Beijing. It not only develops classes incorporating traditional Chinese culture, but also embraces western education practice, to enrich children’s characters and to cultivate a new generation of international citizens. Based on this belief, ELK hopes to have a clear indication of this culture merge in their identity design. It should have characteristics from both cultures, and keep the design simple yet powerful.

We chose bamboo shoots as our ideology. Bamboo shoots are early form of bamboos, the same as children are early form of adults. In fact, bamboo itself is a symbol of elegancy, strong, and upright in traditional Chinese culture. The skin of bamboo shoots is interwoven and layered, just like the merge of Chinese and western cultures. Bamboo is also a plant that has super fast growth speed, which symbolize our hope for the next generations, to grow firmly and fast.

We extract the image into a design that is composed of geometry shapes, showing the idea we hope to communicate: elegancy, culture merge, and firm growth. Three Chinese characters are customized to match the symbol.